The Jewish Spark, Muriel Spark

I think I blogged about this previously (yes, I did), but here, then, it is again:-

...Spark (whom Stannard familiarly, and annoyingly, calls Muriel throughout the book) was born in Edinburgh in 1918. Her father, Barney Camberg, was the son of Russian Jews; her mother, Sarah, known as Cissy, was raised as a Christian but agreed to be married in a synagogue. Neither was very religious, and what the family really worshipped was middle-class respectability. Barney, who worked in a rubber factory, came home to their rented flat every night, bathed and put on a suit and tie. He and Cissy liked to dance and entertain and take a drink. (Cissy, who may have been an alcoholic, admitted to going through a bottle of Madeira every day to steady her nerves.) Both parents made a point of sending their children (Muriel had an older brother) to fee-paying schools even if it meant taking in lodgers and banishing Muriel to a sofa in the kitchen.

Spark went to James Gillespie’s High School for Girls, where she came under the influence of an eccentric, charismatic teacher named Christina Kay, the model for the title character in “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.” (The original, who was stocky and had a mustache, sounds less glamorous than her fictional counterpart but shared Brodie’s habit of speaking in non sequiturs and her love of Mussolini.) Unable to afford university, Spark left school at 16, took a course in précis-writing at a secretarial college and went to work at a fashionable department store. She always had disastrous taste in men, and at 19 she married Sydney Oswald Spark (or S.O.S., as she later referred to him), a math teacher and nonobservant Jew 13 years her senior, who promised her a new life in what was then Southern Rhodesia.

The wedding night, Spark later said, was a “botch-up,” and so was the rest of the marriage. S.O.S, who was mentally unstable to begin with, became violent and abusive. They soon separated, and in 1943 Spark, who by then had a 4-year-old son, Robin, divorced her husband. It was forbidden to transport children during the war, so she parked the boy in an African convent school and returned on her own to Scotland. Robin didn’t make it home until he was 7, and by then Spark had embarked on a new life as a struggling writer in England. She left his upbringing to her mother and, intermittently, to her ex-husband, who raised him as a Jew...The transforming event of these years was Spark’s conversion to Catholicism in 1954...

...Predictably, Spark and her son grew estranged, especially after Robin embraced Orthodox Judaism, and she cut him out of her will.